> As you point out, the dog is a prop, a talisman. > Here's where I disagree with you (but only in the details).

Oh I agree, the dog saying 'yes' was meant to be the officer using the dog to note on paper that 'dog said yes'.

As you said, in case of this group, they didn't have to pretend much at all. I imagine others would actually have a functional, probably somewhat non-obvious alerting signal. But this groups was getting good results without trying much.

I think they probably learned their lesson from this -- spend more time training the dog to actually alert and figure out how to make it do it reliably and out of the sight of the camera.